medieval font design

[Till Rettig]

Hei,

I am slowly evolving in my ideas and trials on the "ancient" fonts for 
lilypond. So far I have a couple of good scans from which I would like 
to take the shapes. But how is the best to get them into metafont? I 
found something about mfpic (probably not good in this case), fig2mf 
(sounds already better) and ps2mf (this might be the best?). But are 
they good, can they do the job? I am so far imaginating that I would 
take the scans as a picture and then kind of draw around them inside of 
a vector programm. This would give them at least a really "handwritten" 
lining. The other idea that somehow sounded logical to me was the way 
suggested in the fontforge tutorial: designing a glyph by setting points 
at the outline of the glyph until there are enough points to describe 
the form. But how is this done for instance in xfig? (As far as I 
understand fontforge doesn't export to fm).
I acknowleged the fact that I will have to learn something about 
metafont anyways, I thought I would go through the metafont tutorial by 
Christophe Grandsire, this is old but since the program seems to be the 
same... At the moment it just seems that I won't be able to draw the 
wanted forms nonvisually, that is in the way that I would just write a 
mf file.

Then about the single parts of the font (now for some white and black 
mensural notation): I will create noteheads and stems extra, but since 
the stems in some cases will have a form like the stem from the ! sign 
(bigger at top), they won't fit together with the flags. So should there 
be a separate flag + stem or rather a stem-flag combination?

And still the idea about introducing some variability to mimick the 
handscribe, that is to have about four or five slightly different glyphs 
that would be used in arbitrary order. Is something like this possible 
in lilypond?

Ok, so far
Greetings
Till